Good practice for many audio sources in scene (Unity engine only)

Unity Engine
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1

Hey!
I have general concerns regarding “how to manage many audio sources playing various clips with different pitch levels”.

Example: this could be in a platform game with thousands of platforms, each making noises when moving / exploding / etc.

Solutions:

  1. First I was thinking having 1 audio source component per platform, but isn’t it difficult for Unity to handle thousands audio sources in a scene?
  2. Then I thought about having 1 single manager that plays clips (on 1 single audio source) based on events triggered by the platforms. For having variations between pitch levels, I would just load each clip several times in memory with a different pitch level and play them randomly. But is it worth the memory consumption and the work of creating multiple clips?
  3. To avoid having each clip cached several times in memory, I thought about having like 6 audio sources handled by the manager, each with different pitch level and play clips randomly on those audio sources.

Do you have any thoughts? Thanks :slight_smile:

Notes:

  • I only refer to Unity engine, not using external audio tools like Wwise or Fmod
  • No 3D spatialisation of the sound